Marketers who fail to get to grips with new spam-blocking filters are at serious risk of failing to deliver emails to the inboxes of consumers and potentially losing business for clients.
That is the verdict of Return Path director of response consulting Guy Hanson, who also sits on the DMA’s Email Marketing Council.
Speaking at the launch of the DMA’s new white paper on email deliverability, Hanson outlined that ISPs and spam filters are shifting away from penalising ‘bad’ email and moving towards rewarding ‘good’ email instead.
To do this, engagement metrics are being used to provide a view of whether subscribers are interacting positively or negatively with their marketing emails.
ISPs have been attempting to deal with rising spam volumes by using increasingly aggressive tactics to identify and block unwanted commercial email.
However, with the percentage of so-called ‘false positives’ generated by this approach reaching unacceptable levels, ISPs have introduced a new set of behavioural metrics to improve the way they identify and eliminate spam to prevent blocking legitimate commercial email activity.
Subscribers who don’t delete without reading, who nominate emails as “Not spam”, and who retrieve emails that have been mistakenly routed to the spam folder, are all demonstrating positive interactions with their marketing emails, with senders of these emails being rewarded with preferential placement in the inbox.
The study shows that sender reputation remains the cornerstone of email deliverability, and the primary factors that influence reputation metrics (infrastructure, data quality, and complaints) represent the key metrics that email marketers need to have their fingers on. Now, however, the subscriber behaviours that are being observed are playing a role in determining the visibility that the senders’ emails enjoy.
Hanson added: “Marketers must understand the changing focus of ISPs and how good email marketing practices are recognised and rewarded.”
